


yet this is music (flowers may flourish still)

by woodswit



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Is this well-researched, Jealousy, Modernish AU, Or historically accurate? Nope, Pining, WWII, the jon/margaery is really minor, with a happy ending
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2020-12-27 03:47:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21112148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/woodswit/pseuds/woodswit
Summary: WWII AU. He tells himself that there are worse things than watching Sansa Stark marry someone else.





	1. Chapter 1

_June, 1939 - Jon_

“You’re really endorsing this?” Jon shrugs into his suit jacket and watches his best friend and cousin Robb Stark crouch in front of his own adored reflection, expertly running a wet comb through his auburn hair. 

“Bit late to try and stop it, eh?” Robb retorts with a sly grin that Jon can see in the mirror. “Where’s that whiskey?”

“Where’s Tyrell?” Jon counters irritably, checking his watch. “He’s cutting it close.”

There’s a soft knock on the door.

“Is Loras there?” Margaery’s soft voice comes through the wood. Jon glances at Robb, who shoots a devilish grin at the door—Margaery brings out the flirt in him—and toys with an auburn wave over his forehead needlessly. Scowling, Jon turns back to the door.

“No.”

He hears Margaery sigh.

“Grandmother always did joke that he’d be late to his own wedding,” she says wryly, and her heels click away. Jon paces, fidgeting pointlessly with his cufflinks. Robb has moved on from obsessing over his already perfect hair to digging around their shabby, rented room for the half-gone bottle of whiskey, and produces it from beneath one of the rickety beds with delight.

“Excellent,” he says, rounding the bed and going to Jon. Jon cannot drink whiskey at a time like this, and he stares at Robb.

“Your little sister is getting married. It wasn’t long ago that you would have murdered Tyrell,” Jon reminds him as Robb uncaps the bottle.

“He’s marrying her, isn’t he? Isn’t that the whole point of murdering any man that looks at your little sister—so that she’s safe until marriage?” Robb throws back a swig of whiskey.

“He’s not _here_ yet,” Jon says, and there is a tightening behind his sternum, a terrible ever-swelling hope. _He might never show up. _But it would crush Sansa. _But then she wouldn’t be marrying him._

There’s another knock on the door.

“We need a man’s opinion,” comes Margaery’s playful voice. "On the veil." Jon suspects she is stalling until Loras’ arrival. Robb makes a show of grimacing in horror.

“I can’t give an opinion on my little sister’s wedding outfit,” Robb says as Margaery opens the door. She’s dressed in a pink silk dress that is rather more daring than appropriate, as usual, and she is batting her lashes at Robb.

“No? Then what about you, Jon Snow?” she asks coyly, turning her doe-like eyes on Jon. Jon’s mouth goes dry.

“I don’t know anything about veils, and all of that,” he dismisses lamely, hurriedly, turning away, but Margaery grabs his arm, pulling him out of the rented room.

“No, but you know about _pretty girls_, don’t you?” She’s dragging him down the hall of the hotel. The wallpaper, an evergreen dotted with gold, is peeling by the crown moulding. Here by the sea the salty air gets everywhere, makes everything smell salty and musty, makes paper curl and wood warp. The floor beneath them is uneven as their finest shoes click on the wood. His heart is a useless, fluttering little thing inside of him.

At the end of the hall, Sansa’s door is ajar. “I’ve brought Snow, darling,” Margaery calls, bursting into the room, and Jon is hit with a blur of light and lace, the air heady with a sweet floral perfume that he has craved, tasted in his darkest, most hidden desires, for years.

The room is filled with light, the windows open and letting in the ocean air, and Sansa is standing before a mirror, all in white. She rounds on him quickly, cheeks flushed.

Jon has known her his entire life, and has loved her his entire life. He has never dared to think of how he might feel to see her in a wedding dress, and now he wishes he had—he might be more prepared. The dress is short-sleeved and silky, and ends below her knees. She’s made it herself. She’s wearing her mother’s pearls, and there is pink on her lips, and her fingers are fluttering around her hair nervously.

“Tell us, Jon—which veil makes Sansa look even _more _lovely?” Margaery asks, holding up one short veil over Sansa, then the other. They look identical; it does not matter which one she chooses. She is perfect. 

Jon stares. He cannot make his mouth move. Margaery pauses, studying him carefully, and his face flushes as he realizes he is giving himself away.

“Th-the short one,” he finally wrenches out. Sansa is biting her lip, her eyes filling with tears, as Margaery pins the veil in place with a fleeting, shrewd look at him, and both girls turn to look in the mirror. Even Margaery’s eyes are filling with tears.

“You look _perfect,_” Margaery says thickly, and she hugs Sansa tightly. Sansa turns back to Jon, her lovely face shining.

“Wh-what do you think?” she asks, looking down and swishing her skirt about her legs. Jon clears his throat.

“It’s very… it’s a dress,” he says awkwardly, and Sansa bursts out laughing at him.

Margaery is still studying him.

“Let me see about Loras,” she says suddenly, and briskly leaves the room.

And now they are alone.

Sansa’s face falls, and she turns away.

“He’s always late,” she says, walking toward the window. “Always. Margaery said her grandmother always joked that he would be late to his own wedding. Then I heard her telling you and Robb that, again; I suppose she does not know what else to say.”

Jon thinks that Loras is a fool, that he is entirely unworthy of Sansa. But he does not say it. She needs kindness now—it is past gone the time for truth.

“He’ll be here,” he says, stepping closer. Sansa turns back to him in surprise. Words of encouragement are rare from him; he knows this because he has been careful to make it so. He has only complimented her when necessary, has only looked at her when necessary, and has never, ever touched her. And now she is stepping towards him in a rush, moving as though to embrace him, and he cannot breathe as he steps back hastily out of her reach and ignores how her brows knit together, how she retreats quickly, humiliated. “I-I don’t want to ruin your dress,” he stammers, but it is not enough. She swallows and looks back out the window.

“If he doesn’t show, I will feel like such a fool,” she whispers, touching the glass. It’s a sunny day, a perfect day, and the ocean glitters in the distance. He does not know it in this moment, but this day will be the last time he sees Sansa for many years, and this instant—her delicate, capable fingers ghosting over the warped glass; the sunlight turning her copper hair gold; his head spinning with her perfume and his heart squeezing with love—will be the moment he returns to over and over again as the world burns and blackens and crumbles around him, as he watches life seep between his fingers, as he feels the earth rumble beneath him. It will be the moment that keeps him from wishing for death, the moment that makes his legs move even when his mind has left him, the moment that will break him and piece him back together all over again.

“You’re not a fool,” he says fiercely. He wants to tell her that Loras is the fool, that she is perfect, that she is everything; he wants to beg her not to marry Loras—marriage seems as final and grim as death; he wants to touch her, more than anything.

But then the door is thrown open, and Margaery is beaming. Loras has arrived, evidently, and his moment to say something, _anything,_ to Sansa has passed.

His time has passed. Now, it—whatever_ it_ is—is too late.

As Margaery passes him, their eyes meet, and he knows he has been seen. She holds his gaze, but he cannot tell what she is silently asking him. But then she turns, abruptly, and in a flurry he is being carried forth by time to the little sunwashed church where this impulsive, foolish wedding is happening.

Robb is tipsy, Sansa is weeping, Loras is carelessly handsome and perhaps a little too careless of just how lucky he is. There are little flowers tucked in Sansa’s hair shaped like stars and the church door is open, so that all through the ceremony they hear the waves and the gulls and the pleasurable shouts of summer. It is the fantasy of young love, and later Jon will marvel at how much brighter this day seems by the darkness of what will follow it.

There is a moment, just before Loras slides the gold band onto Sansa’s finger. A moment he will tell himself, for years, could not have possibly happened: she looks up at him. In the strange watery darkness of the chapel, fragrant and green as the cool air beneath a hedgerow, their eyes meet, and there is a singular moment of awareness, a moment of blinding hope, that is immediately dashed. She looks back at Loras, and Jon looks down at his own clasped hands, ashamed of himself.

Later that night—or maybe it’s in the morning—they’re in the local pub, faces flushed with alcohol. They started with champagne, and now Robb and Jon are back to the whiskey, and Margaery has joined them, but Sansa and Loras are dancing in the middle of the little pub, barely swaying. Sansa is gazing up at Loras, and Loras’ gaze is cast to the side. Jon drinks because he has to be here, has to pretend that this is not painful. He tells himself that it will all be over soon; later, he will laugh darkly at his own folly, at his youthful and selfish distaste for time, the very thing he will later yearn for with the thirst of a man lost and burning.

Soon, Loras will whisk Sansa off to the room upstairs that’s been rented for their wedding night, where Margaery has mischievously scattered rose petals and left a bottle of champagne. And Margaery and Robb will traipse off, and he will be alone with his regret.

No one will miss him. So Jon gets to his feet, and slips out of the pub unnoticed, into the flat blue night.

The ocean’s not a far walk. Even from the road it roars with the night in his ears. The water looks impossibly black and unforgiving. Jon will soon find himself flying planes over that same black water, and he will never fail to think of this moment: how he stands in the sand, carrying a half-gone bottle of champagne, while Sansa dances with another man. 


	2. Chapter 2

_June, 1939_

It’s nearly dawn when the newlyweds stumble into the hotel room they have rented for the night; their marriage bed. The window has been left open and the bedroom air smells of salt, and the lace curtains flutter as Sansa shuts the door behind them. Loras is dropping drowsily onto the bed, handsome face still aglow with the evening, his chestnut brown hair—lovelier than a girl’s; Sansa has always admired it—mussed with champagne. 

She lingers by the door as Loras splays out, unaware of her, on the bed. Their bed. He is laughing softly to himself. 

“What a night,” he groans, mopping his face. “Never thought I’d find myself mixing champagne and whiskey.” She might as well be Robb, she thinks, for how much Loras is paying her mind. Later, she will wonder if Loras would have indeed been happier to have Robb in the bedroom, but for now she is young and has been dreaming of this moment for years. She has dreamed, lolling in her childhood bed, and swooned over imaginings of a man dark and handsome taking her hand and brushing her fingers against his lips; she has dreamed of lazing in bed together and tasting the salt air and thinking of a dreamy future gilded in magic. 

But the room is dark, and Loras is drunk, and there is no magic here. Whatever hopeful glow might have suffused their wedding and their dancing has been snuffed out and now it feels terribly lonely. A tiny voice wonders if Sansa has somehow made a mistake, or if—worse—there is no magic, no romance. She bites her lip. 

“I’ve been waiting to be alone with you all night,” she says shyly, because it’s the sort of thing a woman might say in the pictures and it sounds terribly seductive to her naive ears. Loras lifts his head to look at her with his lip curled. 

“Alone? We hardly had anyone at our wedding. We’ve practically been alone together all night,” he counters, flopping back down. He lets out a long sigh, and there is a depth to it that neither whiskey nor champagne can bring. Suddenly the last thing Sansa wants is to be alone with him. “Renly was supposed to come,” Lorassays suddenly. “What an ass,” he scoffs. “Of course he’d miss my wedding day.” 

“We didn’t invite him—“

“—I did.” 

Sansa goes to the window and sees a slim figure walking back from the beach, silvered by the moon. She thinks of Jon, though she doubts the man walking back alone is Jon. She thinks of his dismissal of her embrace, thinks of how, in the chapel, she had felt all the hairs raise along her skin and when she had looked back—how had she known to look back at him?—Jon was looking at her. It had stolen the breath from her, and for a distraction she had focused on the ceremony, on Loras’ tepid kiss and the way he slid her plain gold band onto her finger while his doe-like eyes flicked, irresistibly, to the mouth of the chapel. She turns from the window, and from the thought of Jon. 

Loras is feigning sleepiness; he is a poor actor and there is something staged about how he drapes himself across the pillows. Sansa thinks of the pretty slipper-pink satin underpinnings that she put on so hopefully this morning, of the perfume she had dabbed between her breasts. Now she feels like a fool.

“Are we not going to—“ she begins, though she knows better. 

“Darling, we’ve got the rest of our lives,” Loras mumbles, making a show of yawning and turning over. “Must we rush it all in one day?” 

“You were the one who wanted to marry so quickly. I thought—“

“—Yes, and now we’re married,” Loras interrupts, his voice clear. 

Sansa does not say anything more. She picks up one of the knitted blankets and sits in the spindly chair in the corner, and waits for morning to come. 

* * *

The next morning, Jon runs into Margaery at the station. She looks distracted, unhappy. Across the platform, their eyes meet, and as always, she is the first to wave. Men’s eyes follow her in her summery frock, her audacious heels clacking along the platform, and she approaches Jon with a forced smile. 

“You’re leaving early too?” she greets. Jon thinks of the flicker of gold in the darkness as Loras slid the band onto Sansa’s finger. “I suppose it’s poor form for us to leave Robb alone with the newlyweds. He won’t have anyone to talk to at breakfast,” she jokes. Jon does not miss that her hair is rumpled, that her lipstick looks harried, that her eyes flick away when she says Robb’s name. 

“He’ll be alright,” Jon says. “Robb always is.” 

Did she spend the night with Robb? There’s a reeling sort of regret about her. They stand there, side by side, on the platform. Margaery is hugging herself, though the day is warm. The platform around them begins to crowd. 

“You’ll be alright too,” she says suddenly. The train is approaching, rattling and pounding like Jon’s heart. They look at each other as the gusts from the incoming train pick up Margaery’s curls and turn them wild.

“O-of course I will be,” Jon blunders as the polished black train rolls in before them. “Why wouldn’t I be?” 

Margaery scoffs, looks away. 

“You know, I think the only person who wanted this wedding was grandmother,” she muses. Jon thinks in a flash of what he has been avoiding—Sansa curled in her wedding bed with Loras—and then shoves the thought away in horror, watches Margaery shift her suitcase and start toward the conductor. 

“What does that mean?” he calls after her. Margaery just laughs but does not look back at him, and he boards the train after her. In the cramped corridor, she turns back to him as a man in uniform takes her suitcase. For a moment, they are alone. 

“Does it hurt your pride if you are not a woman’s first?” she asks suddenly. Jon almost balks in surprise, yet a certain calm settles over him. He should not be surprised. He knows both Margaery’s reputation and Robb’s burning pride. As though at the pictures he can imagine what spiraled between them last night: Robb’s cheeks flushed with anger, Margaery daringly confessing her sins over a coupe of champagne, a room ringing with the memory of Robb’s temper and Margaery smoking alone.

“No,” he says at last. She smiles. 

“Come over, sometime. Sansa isn’t the only one who is good at pretending. I can show you all of London’s secrets, so that you forget yours.”

She leaves him in the corridor, as passengers begin to push past him, swarming around him. 

* * *

“They say it’s going to happen. And soon.”

Sansa is shopping, pretending not to hear the women around her. The chaos of the market around her is usually comforting, but today it rattles her teeth, makes her head ache. The day is unpleasantly humid, the worst of summer. She’s holding a loaf of bread that feels sodden in her hands. 

“Come off it. You’re saying that to upset me,” the other one argues. She’s the woman who owns the stall and she gives Sansa a friendly smile. “Just the bread, love?”

”Yes, thank you.” 

She takes her groceries and begins the trek back home, to their apartment. Though the day is bright, and the air shimmers with summertime, she cannot bring herself to care. She is lonely, and even the prospect of seeing Margaery for tea today cannot lift her spirits. Margaery has been strangely distant, lately, and when Sansa does see her, she seems distracted and avoidant. It is like Sansa’s got something on her face that Margaery is itching to tell her about but won’t, and makes Sansa feel both embarrassed and angry. 

Margaery lives alone, now that Loras has moved in with Sansa, in a flat in Central London afforded by her inheritance. It is all floral wallpaper, rose-colored silk, crystal and velvet. When Margaery shows her in with a rush of strong perfume, Sansa stands in the entry way and takes her hat off. There’s a man’s coat on one of the hooks, and Margaery looks like she just woke up. 

“Do we know him?” Sansa tries to tease, nodding to the coat which somehow looks familiar. She expects a sly remark from Margaery, perhaps a joke and a shrug, but Margaery only looks away, rubbing at her eye tiredly. 

“Um,” she begins, leading Sansa into the magnificent parlor, “no, we don’t. Tea?” She asks brightly. “Or something stronger?” 

Last night’s dress is still draped over the sofa, as is a silk stocking. The two women stand uncomfortably in the parlor. “Sorry,” Margaery says. “It was a late night.” 

Sansa does not need to be a married woman to know that the room still is humid with something illicit. She feels another spike of unreasonable anger—she does not know the room smells like sex, yet somehow she knows. She and Loras sleep separately at night, and he had never touched her. She swallows her anger. 

“Never mind it,” she reassured Margaery. “Might we open a window?” 

Even Margaery has to flush at that. Sansa turns grimly from her friend and goes to the window. In the middle of lifting it, she spots a familiar figure approaching, crossing the street. The sun sets him aglow and she freezes. Jon is approaching, shirtsleeves rolled up in the heat. His purpose is Margaery’s flat, she realizes. She thinks of the coat, of the silk stocking. “I—I’ll just be right back,” she chokes. Margaery is picking up the scattered clothing. “Loo,” she explains, and stumbles to the bathroom and locks the door like she’s about to be sick. 

She covers her mouth as she hears the door open. Low murmuring of Jon’s voice. They speak in hushed, embarrassed tones, and then the door shuts again. He is gone. Her heart is pounding and when she looks in the little circle mirror she realizes her eyes are wet and she does not know why. 

When she comes out, she cannot look at Margaery, and Margaery cannot look at her. 

“You know, it’s getting late, and Loras said he’d be home early,” Sansa says hastily, walking to the door. Untouched tea steams on the little marble and brass table before Margaery’s sofa. “I’d better get home.”

”Oh, of course.” Margaery does not even question it, and Sansa realizes she knows that Sansa now knows. The man’s coat by the door is gone. “Give him my love.”

If she were a braver woman, she might say, ‘give Jon my love,’ back, as a joke, as a sting. But Sansa can only wave and burst out with her groceries into the summer afternoon, reeling as though she has been struck. 


	3. Chapter 3

_July, 1939 - Sansa_

"You're not scared?"

Loras is standing at the window, smoking, looking out at London in the blue darkness. He smells like cologne, and though he won't not meet her eyes, Sansa has glimpsed a raw redness to them, a dull look of grief that has turned into anger and recklessness. His hair, in need of a haircut, has been falling into his eyes, and when she asked him earlier what was wrong, her husband told her nothing was. 

Now he's telling her he is volunteering. 

She does not know this man, and he does not know her. Even Margaery's sordid relationship with Jon has more intimacy than her marriage does, but Sansa brushes aside the thought of them when her husband, who has still never touched her, scoffs. 

"Scared?" He doesn't even look back at her over his shoulder. "Why on earth should I be scared?" 

He should not have to ask this, and she should not have to explain it. But she does anyway, because Sansa always has hope, foolish hope, and just as every night she wears perfume and a silky nightdress and waits up for him with a glass of something golden and the record playing, so she plunges onward anyway. 

"You might not come back." 

Loras leaves; she hears the door slam. Sansa sits alone in their dimly-lit kitchen, the window open to let in the night air. 

_July, 1939 - Jon_

"Loras is enlisting, too." 

Margaery's bedroom is thick with smoke. She lays on her back beside him, polished fingers poised with her cigarette, and they stare at the ceiling. "Sansa will be devastated. Losing her brother, her husband, and—well—you." 

Jon does not bother asking Margaery if she is devastated; he knows that she is, but not because of him. She did not ask him to stay, and he did not offer it. When he came to her door tonight, same as he always does, she had opened the door and, still standing on the doorstep, he had told her, and she had not said anything—she had only led him upstairs, and in wordless commune they had done as they always do. 

"Sansa won't even know I've enlisted," he counters softly. Margaery lifts her head to look at him. 

"You lovely fool," she says sadly. Their eyes meet, and her lips curve into a sly smile, though it's sad, too. "At least one of us isn't wasting his precious rosebuds...not really, anyway." She settles back onto her plush pillows, inhaling thoughtfully. 

"What does that mean?" 

"Loras." She exhales and he watches the smoke. This is their last night together, likely ever, and he wishes, out of respect to Margaery, that he had been thinking of her. At the very least, he knows she was not thinking of him. That was the agreement, after all. "You must already know." 

He does not speak right away. Jon is good at reading people, and Loras does not make it difficult; besides, there have always been rumors. "It's Renly. It's always been Renly, and everyone knows it." Margaery's tone is casual, but Jon feels himself tensing. "Loras told me he cannot even bring himself to touch Sansa. He hardly ever spends the night there. I can't imagine why Grandmother really thought the marriage would change things. But I'm sure tonight he'll be drowning his sorrows at the pub."

Jon thinks of the flicker of gold in the church, thinks of how Loras was not even looking at her. He thinks of her fluttering hope. He is so filled with rage that he cannot speak. 

"I should go," he says, rising up from the bed. Margaery sits up, clutching the blankets round her form. She offers him that wry look, and watches him as he dresses. 

"Are you off to gather ye rosebuds?" she teases. "Off to finally tell her you love her, before it's too late?" She turns to put out her cigarette. 

"No." Jon buttons his shirt.

They pause and regard each other. This is, unquestionably, the most dishonorable and unforgivable thing he has ever done, this sordid slipping into Margaery's home so many nights for silent, impersonal yet wildly private sex. And yet, what might he have done instead, to cope with everything? "I—"

"—Don't," Margaery interrupts. "Don't insult me by turning this into something that it never was." 

"I wasn't," Jon says honestly. "But it's still—"

"—Hush. Let's just leave it this way, leave it nice and pretty and bloodless, won't you?" She lights another cigarette. "Just go. And good luck." 

Jon leaves Margaery's home for the final time. The night is not yet over, and the air is thick with the summer humidity. Tonight might be his last night wandering freely in London ever again—his last night wandering freely at all. And he knows exactly how he would like to spend it. His vision has never been clearer. _He cannot even bring himself to touch Sansa. _His anger is searing in his chest, making it hard to breathe, and he walks with purpose, just short of a run. He smacks into late-evening revelers, and the night glitters with a chaotic, wild fear around him. It is coming, they all know it, and there is a sense of watching something fall before it shatters, all around them. A lurching disbelief, a sense of clinging to what has not come to pass yet. But none of that matters to Jon, because he is on a mission. 

It does not take so many tries to find Loras. In the end, he's in a tiny pub just down the road from his apartment that he shares with Sansa, and he's leaving money on the bar, sliding off the barstool raggedly. It does not seem possible that the golden boy who was adored by all the girls has turned to this, but the man who turns slowly to look at Jon is nearly unrecognizable. In the sallow yellow glow of the bar, their eyes meet. Loras' are ringed red; he is not a happy man. But Jon does not care. 

"Outside," he says in a low voice. A few men are looking at them with interest, but Loras, to his credit, follows Jon out at once. 

"What could you possibly want, Snow?" Loras asks as they turn to face each other in the street. His shirt—bespoke, tailored just for him, because even in his misery Loras comes from Tyrell money and it both chains him and frees him—is stained with beer, and his curly hair, soft chestnut curls like Margaery's, is wild and greasy. Jon almost feels sorry for him, but then—no—he really doesn't. He shoves Loras against the wall, and though Loras is quick, he's well-drunk, and he's not a man who knows how to be drunk. He coughs in surprise, but even so reaches to push Jon back. They scuffle in the darkness, gravel crunching beneath their shoes. Once, twice, Jon is smacked against the wall as well, and Loras lands a solid hit to his eye. It will be black tomorrow, but it will be worth it. The world is already falling apart, and this man has everything that Jon has ever wanted, and he has the audacity to—he cannot even think it. A surge of rage pulses in him, and he at last slams Loras against the wall once more. 

The two men stare at each other, struggling to catch their breath. Loras' perfect nose is bleeding, and dark blooms blossom on his white shirt. 

"Go home to her," Jon orders, curling and uncurling his fingers into fists. His knuckles are raw, and his eye throbs. Loras lifts his chin, presses his lips together. 

"You really think seeing me like this will make her any happier?" 

Jon stalks away from him. He should not go to Sansa. Nothing can come from it, and he knows it. But just to see her once more, even if they do not speak... But when he pauses before their apartment, and stares up at their window, it is dark. Jon leans against the wall and tries to catch his breath. He closes his eyes. 

What if he—no. 

But they grew up together; even if she does not love him, she must care for him, and would want to—no. 

_Leave it nice and pretty and bloodless, won't you? _Margaery had asked him. And she is right. Sansa will be saying goodbye to her husband, to her brother. She does not need to say goodbye to him as well. 

_July 1939 - Sansa_

She watches Jon Snow walk away, from her darkened window. She has been waiting for Loras to come back, fearful of what he has done to himself, but now she has forgotten about Loras entirely. Jon walks down the road, hands shoved in his pockets. A wild thought comes to her, that she might run after him, that she might beg him to kiss her. He kisses Margaery; she knows he does. She knows because she can no longer look at her once best friend, and her chest aches strangely when she pictures them, furtive and hasty, in the darkness of Margaery's flat. 

It is near dawn when Loras comes home at last. In the bathroom, she dabs a damp washcloth at his face, which is smeared with blood. He is limp to her touch, and she does not ask him what happened. 

"He loves you," Loras says suddenly, in the ringing silence of the bathroom. Sansa almost drops the cloth, and cradles his lovely, ruined face in her hands as he gazes up at her with those doe-like eyes. "Jon Snow loves you." 

Averted eyes in a cramped bedroom by the sea, a terse jaw and clenched fists, eyes that meet hers in a moment of singing clarity in the chapel. Furtive kisses in the dark and years, years, of breathless moments that made her feel strange and lovely, moments where their eyes did not quite meet and moments where she saw the nape of his neck and thought of how his skin might taste. She turns from her husband, her hands shaking. 

"You'll be late," is all she can say. 


End file.
